“Excuse me if I offended you,” I said.
“Oh hell, no offense! I’m not really touchy, but what the hell, we’ll probably be working together; might as well understand each other a little. See you tomorrow for dinner, then. So long!”
“So long.”
He turned and strode cleanly across the lawn, grown tall in the students’ absence. Apparently Joe Morgan was the sort who heads directly for his destination, implying by his example that paths should be laid where people walk, instead of walking where the paths happen to be laid. All very well for a history man, perhaps, but I could see that Mr. Morgan would be a fish out of water in the prescriptive grammar racket.
3
A Turning Down of Dinner Damped, in Ways Subtle Past Knowing
A TURNING DOWN OF DINNER DAMPED, IN WAYS SUBTLE PAST KNOWING, manic keys on the thin flute of me, least pressed of all, which for a moment had shrilled me rarely.
It began with Laocoön on the mantelpiece, his voiceless groan. The set of that mouth was often my barometer, told me the weight of day; on Wednesday after my interview, when I woke and consulted him with a happening glance, his pain was simply Bacchic! That was something, now! Out of bed I sprang, unclothed, to put a dance on the phonograph while the spell should last. Against all of Mozart I owned a single Russian dance, a piece of Ilya Mourometz, measured and sprightly, lively and tight—there, now, Laocoön!
The dusty maple incandesced; sunshine fired the speckled windows and filled my room with a sparkle of light, and I danced like an unfurred Cossack, spinning and jumping. Once in a blue moon I felt that light—sweet manic!—and it lasted a scant three minutes, till a ring from the phone dispersed it.
I shut off the music, furious. A man with so short time to prance deserved a history of unanswered phones. “Hello?”
“Hello, Jacob Horner?” It was a woman, and I felt naked as I was.
“Yes.”
“This is Rennie Morgan, Joe Morgan’s wife. Say, I think Joe already asked you over for dinner tonight, didn’t he? I just called to make it official.”
I allowed a pause to lie along the line.
“I mean, after your interview, you know, we wanted to make sure you’d come on the right day!
“Jacob? Are we still connected?”
“Yes. Excuse me.” I was checking my barometer, Laocoön, who now looked dolorous enough. Batygh the Tartar had breathed on us.
“Well, it’s all set, then? Any time after six-thirty: that’s when we put the kids to bed.”
“Well, say, Mrs. Morgan, I guess—”
“Rennie. Okay? My name’s Renée, but nobody calls me that.”
“—I guess I won’t be able to make it tonight after all.”
“What?”
“No, I’m pretty sure I can’t. Thanks a lot for inviting me.”
“But why not? Are you sure you can’t make it?”
Why not? Bitch of an Eagle Scout’s Hausfrau, you spoiled my first real manic in a month of Sundays! I spit on your dinner!
“I’d kind of planned on riding up to Baltimore this afternoon, have a look around. Something came up.”
“Oh, now, aren’t you just getting out of it? Come on and say so; we’re not committed to each other.” This from a wife? “Don’t be a chicken—it doesn’t make a damn to us if you don’t like us.”
So caught, flagrante delicto, I flushed and sweated. What was this beast honesty ridden by a woman? An answer was awaited: I heard Joe Morgan’s wife breathing in my naked ear.
Very discreetly I hung up the phone. Not only that: I walked the first three steps away on tiptoe before I realized what I was doing, and blushed again to notice it.
Ah, well, the spell was broken, and I knew better than to try Glière and his Ilya Mourometz again. He’s the fizz that makes the collins bright, is Glière, but he’s not the vodka; these manics can’t be teased or dickered with. Now I was not only unmanic, I was uncomfortable.
And resentful! There’s something to be said for the manic-depressive if his manics are really manic; but me, I was a placid-depressive: a woofer without a tweeter was Jake Horner. My lows were low, but my highs were middle-register. So when I’d a real manic on I nursed it like a baby, and boils plague the man who spoiled it! That was one thing. More’s the damage to have it suggested, and by a woman, that my honesty was flagging. Can a man stomach it? That it was a fact was beside the point. Great heavens, Morgans, the world’s not that easy!
Even as I was dressing, the telephone rang again, with a doggedness that bespoke Mrs. Morgan. In a moment of lewdness (for I was pulling up my trousers at the time) I considered allowing that beskirted Diogenes to address her quest to my bare backside—but I let the moment go. Rennie, girl, said I to myself, I am out; be content that I don’t commit a lewdness with your voice, since you’ve aborted my infant manic. Ring away, girl scout: your quarry’s not in his hole.
Later that morning I drove the thirty miles from Wicomico to Ocean City, there to fry my melancholy in the sun and pickle it in the ocean. But light and water only made it blossom. The beach was crowded with human beings whose reality I found myself loath to acknowledge; another day they might have been as soothingly grotesque as was my furniture, but this day they were merely irritating. Furthermore, perhaps because it was a weekday, there was not a girl on the beach worth the necessary nonsense involved in a pickup. Only a forest of legs ruined by childbirth; fallen breasts, potbellies, haggard faces, and strident voices; a rats’ nest of horrid children, as unlovely as they were obnoxious. When one is not in the spirit of it, there are few things less diverting than a public beach.
When I reached the saturation point, about three o’clock, I washed the sand off me and headed back to the car. But one who felt as gloomily competent as I that day wouldn’t leave Ocean City without at least going through the motions of picking up a girl, any more than one would leave Pikes Peak without spitting—the trip were pointless otherwise. Along the boardwalk a few girls prowled in twos and threes, most wearing T-shirts with the name of either a college or a sorority printed on them. They met my glowering haughtily, each of us considering the other unworthy. I walked the three blocks to my car without seeing a target worth the ammunition, and so, like many a hunter nearing home, had finally to settle for even less satisfactory game or take none at all.
A woman of forty—well preserved but definitely forty—whose car was parked in front of mine, was wrenching the handle of her door in vain when I approached. She was slender, not very full-breasted, well tanned, and in no way extraordinary—such an obvious target that I lost my taste for the hunt and walked past.
“Pardon me, sir: I wonder if you could help me?” I turned and glared. The woman had been all brightness with her classic request, but my stare made her falter.
“You’ll think I’m stupid, I guess—I locked my keys inside the car.”
“I can’t pick locks.”
“Oh, I didn’t mean that! My motel is just across the bridge. I was wondering if you’d run me over there, if you’re going that way. I have another key in my suitcase.”
It is small sport shooting the bird who perches on the muzzle of your gun, but what hunter could keep from doing it?
“All right.”
The whole situation was without appeal, and as I drove Miss Peggy Rankin (her name) over the bridge from Ocean City to the mainland, I was made more desultory by the fact that I guessed she didn’t deserve to be so severely judged. She appeared to be fairly intelligent, and indeed, had I been her husband I should doubtless have been proud that my wife still retained such trimness and spirit at age forty. But I was not her husband, and so I made no such allowances: she was a forty-year-old pickup, and only the most extraordinary charm could survive that classification.
All the way to the motel Miss Rankin chattered, and I honestly didn’t hear a word of it. For me this was unusual, because, although I admired the ability to lose oneself in oneself, I was far too conscious of my surroundings, as a
rule, ever to manage it. A real point against Miss Rankin, that.
“This is the place,” she said presently, indicating the Surfside, or Seaside, or some such motel along the highway. I pulled into the driveway and parked. “Gee, I sure appreciate your doing this. Thanks a lot.” She moved lightly out of the car.
“I’ll take you back,” I said, without any particular inflection.
“Oh, would you?” She was very pleased, but not overwhelmed with either surprise or gratitude. “Just a minute, while I run get my keys.”
“Have you got anything cold to drink in there, Peggy? I’m pretty dry.” This was as far as I was willing to go in the nonsense line just then: I decided that if she didn’t ask me in, I’d take off at once for Wicomico.
“Sure, come on in,” she invited, again not entirely stunned by my request. “There’s no refrigerator in the room, but there’s a soda fountain right next door here, and I’ve got whiskey. Why don’t you get two large ginger ales, with lots of ice, and we’ll make highballs.”
I did, and we drank in her little room, she curled on the bed and I slouched in the single chair. The gloom was still on me, but it grew somewhat easier to endure; especially when we found that we could talk or not talk with a reasonable degree of ease. At one point, as might be expected, Miss Rankin asked me what I did for a living. Now, I didn’t necessarily subscribe at all to honesty as a policy in adventures of this sort, and I can’t imagine myself answering such stock questions truthfully as a rule; but “I’m a potential instructor of prescriptive grammar at the Wicomico State Teachers College” is so nearly the type of answer one usually dreams up at such moments that without really thinking about it I told her the truth.
“Is that so!” Peggy was genuinely surprised and pleased this time. “I graduated from WTC myself—so long ago it embarrasses me to remember! I teach English at the high school in Wicomico. Isn’t that a funny coincidence? Two English teachers!”
I agreed that it was, but in fact I was so appalled that I felt like turning in my highball and calling it quits. It was necessary to move very rapidly to keep the whole situation from disintegrating. There was only a half inch of highball left in my paper cup: I tossed it down, dropped the cup into the wastebasket, immediately went to the bed, where my colleague lay propped on one elbow, and embraced her with some élan. She opened her mouth at once under my kiss and thrust her tongue between my teeth. Both of us had our eyes quite open, and I was pleased to accept that fact symbolically. Let there be no horse manure between teachers of English, I declared to myself, and without more ado gave the zipper of her bathing suit a meaningful yank.
Miss Rankin froze: her eyes closed tightly and she clutched my shoulders, but my ungentle attack was not repulsed. The zipper undid her down to the small of her back and so gave me access to a certain amount of innocuous skin, but I could go no farther without her assistance.
“Let’s take your bathing suit off, Peggy,” I suggested cordially.
This injured her. “You’re in a great hurry, aren’t you, Jake?” she said quietly and more or less bitterly.
“Well, Peg, we’re old enough not to be any sillier than we have to be.”
She made a noise in her mouth, and, still holding my shoulders, pressed her forehead against my chest and began to cry a bit.
“By that you mean I’m too old for you to bother being silly with, don’t you?” she observed between sobs. “You’re thinking that a woman my age can’t afford to be coy.”
Fresh tears. Everybody was digging truth out of me.
“Why hurt yourself?” I asked over her hair to the whiskey bottle on the night stand.
“You’re the one that’s doing the hurting,” Miss Rankin wept, looking me square in the eye through her tears. “You go out of your way to let me know you’re doing me a favor by picking me up, but your generosity doesn’t include wasting a little time being gentle!” She flung herself, not violently, upon her pillow, burying her face in it. “It doesn’t make the least bit of difference to you whether I’m bright or stupid or what, does it? I might even be more interesting than you are, since I’m a little older!” This last piece of self-castigation, while it choked her completely for a moment, made her mad enough to sit up and glare at me defiantly.
“I’m sorry,” I offered politely. I was thinking that even if she were talented as, say, Beatrice Lillie, is talented, one would not pick her up in order to witness a theatrical performance: one would purchase a theater ticket.
“Sorry you wasted your time on me, you mean!” Peggy cried. “Just making me defend myself is awful enough!”
Back to the pillow. Up again at once. “Don’t you understand how you make me feel? Today is my last day at Ocean City. For two whole weeks not a soul has spoken to me or even looked at me, except some horrible old men. Not a soul! Most women look awful at my age, but I don’t look awful: I just don’t look like a child. There’s a lot more to me, damn it! And then on the last day you come along and pick me up, bored as you can be with the whole thing, and treat me like a whore!”
Well, she was correct, of course.
“I’m a cad,” I agreed readily, and rose to leave. There was a little more to this matter than Miss Rankin was willing to see, but in the main she had a pretty clear view of things. Her mistake, in the long run, was articulating her protest. The game was spoiled now, of course: I had assigned to Miss Rankin the role of Forty-Year-Old Pickup, a delicate enough character for her to bring off successfully in my current mood; I had no interest whatever in the quite complex (and no doubt interesting, from another point of view) human being she might be apart from that role. What she should have done, it seems to me, assuming she was after the same thing I was after, was assign me a role gratifying to her own vanity—say, The Fresh But Unintelligent Young Man Whose Body One Uses For One’s Pleasure Without Otherwise Taking Him Seriously—and then we could have pursued our business with no wounds inflicted on either side. As it was, my present feeling, though a good deal stronger, was essentially the same feeling one has when a filling-station attendant or a cabdriver launches into his life-story: As a rule, and especially when one is in a hurry or is grouchy, one wishes the man to be nothing more difficult than The Obliging Filling-Station Attendant or The Adroit Cabdriver. These are the essences you have assigned them, at least temporarily, for your own purposes, as a taleteller makes a man The Handsome Young Poet or The Jealous Old Husband; and while you know very well that no historical human being was ever just an Obliging Filling-Station Attendant or a Handsome Young Poet, you are nevertheless prepared to ignore your man’s charming complexities—must ignore them, in fact, if you are to get on with the plot, or get things done according to schedule. Of this, more later, for it is related to Mythotherapy. Enough now to say that we are all casting directors a great deal of the time, if not always, and he is wise who realizes that his role-assigning is at best an arbitrary distortion of the actors’ personalities; but he is even wiser who sees in addition that this arbitrariness is probably inevitable, and at any rate is apparently necessary if one would reach the ends he desires.
Which brings me back to Miss Peggy Rankin. “Get your keys,” I said. “I’ll wait for you out in the car.”
“No! Jake!” she fairly shrieked, and jumped off the bed. I was caught at the door and embraced from behind, under my arms. “Oh, God, don’t go away yet!” Hysteria. “Please, don’t run out on me now! I’m sorry I made you angry!” She was pulling me as hard as she could, back into the room.
“Come on now; cut it out. Get hold of yourself.” A forty-year-old pickup’s beauty, when it is preserved at all, is fragile, and Peggy’s hysteria, added to her previous weeping, left little of loveliness in her face, which normally was long, tan, unwrinkled, and not unattractive.
“Will you stay? Please, don’t walk out that door—don’t pay attention to anything I said a while ago!”
“I don’t know what to do,” I said truthfully, trying to assimilate this outburst. “This w
hole thing means more to you than it does to me. That’s no criticism of anybody. I’m really afraid I might louse it up for you, if I haven’t already.”
I was squeezed tightly.
“I’m in too deep to quit, Jake! If we don’t go to bed now I’ll go crazy.”
“Nonsense.”
Peggy’s voice bordered on unintelligibility. “You’re humiliating me! Don’t make me beg you, for God’s sake!”
By this tune she stood to lose either way. We went back to the bed: what ensued was, for me at least, pure discomfort, and it was of a nature to become an unpleasant memory for her, too, whether she enjoyed it at the time or not. It was embarrassing because she abandoned herself completely to an elaborate gratitude that implied her own humiliation—and because my own mood was not complementary to hers. Her condition remained semi-hysterical and masochistic: she scarcely permitted me to move, flagellated herself verbally, and treated me like a visiting deity. No doubt about it, the old girl had been hard up; she did her best to make grand opera out of nature’s little cantus firmus, and if she didn’t succeed it was more my fault than hers, for she strove elaborately. Another time I might have enjoyed it—that sort of voluptuous groveling can be as pleasant to indulge as it is on occasion to indulge in—but that day was not my day. That day had begun badly, had developed tediously, and was climaxing uncomfortably, if not distastefully: I was always uneasy with women who took their sexual transports too seriously, and Miss Rankin was not the sort whom one could leave shuddering and moaning on the bed knowing it was all just good clean fun.
That is how I left her, at five o’clock. At four forty-five she had begun, as I’d rather expected, to express hatred for me, whether feigned (this kind of thing can be sensuous sport) or sincere I couldn’t say, since her eyes were closed and her face averted. What she said, throatily, was “God damn your eyes, God damn your eyes, God damn your eyes…” in rhythm with what happened to be in progress at the time, and I was not so committed to my mood that it didn’t strike me as funny. But I was weary of dramatics, genuine or not, amusing or not, and when things reached their natural denouement I was glad enough to make my exit, forgetting entirely about Miss Rankin’s keys. The lady had talent, but no discipline. I’m sure we neither wished to see the other again.